This novel of boyhood on the Scottish seaside is “powerful, vivid, evocative, funny, awesome, loving and so assured in its writing it catches the breath” (Glasgow Herald, UK). One of The List Magazine’s 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time In A Twelvemonth and a Day, Christopher Rush delivers a loving lament for the “slow old tuneful times” of St. Monans, the Scottish fishing village of his childhood. It is a semi-autobiographical tale about change and growth, the fluctuating patterns in the work-life of a fishing and farming community throughout the cycle of a year, and about the year itself, the life of nature. Recounting the first twelve years of his young protagonist’s life, Rush tells of how that idyllic life can be destroyed by forces we cannot seem to control: ignorance and greed, profit and loss, the wider forces of politics that damage communities and individuals. Widely acclaimed upon its release in 1985, A Twelvemonth and a Day was adapted for the screen as the 1989 film Venus Peter. This edition features an introduction by Alan Bold. “With its Bible-sized characters, its feeling for workaday rhythms and the cycle of seasons, its tall and grisly tales of storms and wrecks, whales and sharks, witches and fetches, drowning and exhumations, it does convey a sense of that fatalistic awe which the sea inspired in those deeply devout fishing communities.”—Times Literary Supplement, UK
In childhood there is no distinction between boy, bird, mammal or fish. A Twelvemonth and a Day is about change and growth, the fluctuating patterns in the worklife of a fishing and farming community throughout the cycle of a year, and about the year itself, the life of nature. It tells of how that symbolic year-and-a-day can be destroyed by forces we cannot seem to control-ignorance and greed, profit and loss, the wider forces of politics that damage communities and individuals. It is both a lament for a past time and a celebration of its vanished values.
